Ahead of the Curve (30 page)

Ben, the parks official I had sat next to in Analytics, offered to help me prepare for my McKinsey interviews. He had spent the summer between the first and second year at the firm’s Boston office and enjoyed it. More than that, he said he had never met such an intelligent, admirable group of people, or been in a company that cared so deeply for its culture of knowledge, education, and improvement. He saw that the hours could pile up and the work might become repetitive, but he was impressed, and I respected his opinion.

We met over breakfast in Spangler, where he pulled out a large file of caselets—mini business scenarios that consulting firms used to test potential recruits. The interviewer, he said, would begin by offering me a few details about a case. “The client is a beer company whose new light beer is failing to sell in key markets. The company has a history of success and cannot understand why this beer has not succeeded.” A few numbers would follow. When the interviewer stopped talking, you were supposed to begin asking questions. But first, Ben said, you had to ask for a moment.

“Yeah, right, a moment,” I said.

“No, seriously, you have to say, ‘Would you mind if I took a moment here?’ ”

“Those words exactly.”

“Pretty much. You have to show you’re digesting the information. Then you should repeat the scenario to make it clear that you’ve understood it.”

“So, I say, ‘One moment please,’ then say, ‘We’re dealing with a beer company that can’t sell its light beer.’ ”

“Exactly.”

“No deviation.”

“Best not.”

Once you had taken your moment and repeated the problem, you were then expected to start asking questions. “What’s their marketing strategy?” or “Does their beer taste good?” The interviewer slowly revealed facts and numbers as you asked for them and required you to do some quick calculations. What’s the break-even on this business? What’s the market size? The whole exercise would take about twenty minutes. After Ben’s briefing, I attended a special McKinsey-run interview practice session on campus. Eight of us sat around a table while an exhausted-looking junior associate peppered us with caselet questions. Every time she laid out a scenario, the student answering her would say, “Would you mind if I took a moment here?”

My McKinsey interviews occurred at the Doubletree Hotel, an ugly cube just a short walk from the business school. Arriving in the lobby, I saw scores of students from my year, even people who had vowed never to go into consulting. They were all wearing suits and carrying leather folders containing a notepad and pen. It was like arriving in some deviant sex club and finding all your religious friends gawking at the act. Everyone made excuses: “Oh, I’m just doing it for the experience.” “It’s a fall-back option if the private equity job doesn’t come through.” “It’s the only firm offering to send people to South America.” I even caught Bo there: “I’m just going to meet some dudes in the healthcare practice,” he said, looking uncomfortable in his dark suit. “I mean, we’re at HBS. Gotta have a McKinsey interview at some point. It’s part of the experience.”

“You traitor,” I said.

“Well, look at you,” he shot back, poking me in the shoulder. “So much for Mr. Entrepreneur.”

One by one, we were summoned up to a hotel suite with a McKinsey employee. In the first interview, an associate quizzed me about what to do with a failing drugstore. It all came down to adapting the product selection and range of promotions to the needs of the customers. It seemed to go well. In the second interview, a partner at the firm asked me to develop an approach for an investment fund manager with lower margins than its rivals. We were sitting in armchairs and I realized now why everyone had those leather folders. I had to lean my piece of paper against my knee to scribble my notes. I failed to ask for my moment, and flunked the answer. The partner took pity on me. The light had gone out in the sitting area of his suite and I could see through to the rumpled sheets in his bedroom. The room smelled faintly of cigarettes. We sat there in the semidarkness like a pair of guilt-stained adulterers and he asked me what I thought of HBS. I said what I usually said, which was that I felt I had learned a lot, even though the place was a little loopy.

“I hated it when I was here,” he said. “Compared to being an undergraduate at Harvard, the intellectual experience was nothing.” He asked me where I had last gone on holiday and whether I made a good colleague. These were clearly not the questions he reserved for likely hires. We were just killing time. After twenty minutes, he got up and we parted ways. That evening, he called to say I didn’t seem like the right fit. I agreed.

Peter Drucker, the great authority on late-twentieth-century management, wrote that “An employer has no business with a man’s personality. Employment is a specific contract calling for specific performance . . . Any attempt to go beyond this is usurpation. It is immoral as well as an illegal intrusion of privacy. It is abuse of power. An employee owes no ‘loyalty,’ he owes no ‘love’ and no ‘attitudes’—he owes performance and nothing else.”

Why was it then that every speaker who came to Harvard Business School demanded we be “passionate” about our work? There were several ways of looking at this. The first was that the speakers genuinely cared about our enjoying our professional lives. In that case, advising us to follow our passion made a lot of sense. Loving what we did would make working that much less hellish. Another interpretation was that the word
passion
was just another form of corporate coercion. It was no longer enough simply to do a job that you found okay for a reasonable financial reward. You had to say you were passionate about your work even if you found the work meaningless and unsatisfying. And then, of course, if it was your passion, why wouldn’t you want to stay in the office until late at night and all weekend long? Didn’t you say it was your passion? Then why are you going home so early? Not playing on the softball team? Skipping the company barbecue?

Visitors to campus would say in that manic, evangelical way, “Business outsourcing is my passion”; “I have a passion for delivering product to customers”; “Here at Widgets Incorporated, we are passionate about enterprise resource management systems.” But isn’t the truth that passion is a fleeting sensation, one that most humans are lucky to feel even once in their lives? In love, we speak of the first flush of passion, which dims to become something else. We talk of the passionate intensity of composers, artists, and freedom fighters. Perhaps the very greatest businesspeople, the ones whose lives are dominated by their work, share this passion. But the rest of us?

A third explanation was that businesses used the word
passion
because it reflected what they wanted their employees to feel. Work at its best should be about passion, not just drudgery. A few lucky souls might feel genuine passion for their work, but companies used the word so freely, I sensed, because it set a loftier goal for their activities than mere profits. To be in the business of business was not enough. You had to be about something bigger. But where did businesses go after passion? Was it only a matter of time before the head of the Boston Consulting Group told an MBA class, “We bring a panting, sexual intensity to our work.” Or the recruiter from Fidelity: “Our analysts share a knee-trembling, quivering, orgasmic degree of focus on company fundamentals.” Or the CFO of Goldman Sachs: “In the people we hire, we expect to see a stalkerish obsession with financial performance and a downright creepy fascination with the office and all that goes on there, to the total exclusion of anything else, which might bring moments of serendipitous joy to their dreary lives. Going home at any time of day or night signals to us a lack of absolute, maniacal commitment. We demand total devotion.” What would sound like the ravings of a madman coming from, say, Kim Jong-Il had become perfectly commonplace coming from business leaders. The obsession with a single firm-wide culture. Discipline. Order. Unrelenting assessment by one’s peers. The fear of denouncement. A cult of the leader.

A new and potent recruiter on campus was Google. A delegation from the company had visited in October. A recent hire from HBS got up and said that her day consisted mostly of dealing with e-mail and going to meetings. She added that because the company was growing so fast, she often didn’t know what the meetings were all about. Then she handed out pens and T-shirts with the slogan “Do you feel lucky?” and a stack of papers describing jobs the company needed to fill. Almost all of them required either a degree in computing or several years of work experience at a technology company. I passed.

But during my early January slump, I returned to Google’s online job site. I had fond memories of my visit to the firm during the Westrek. I found a posting for a job marketing Book Search, Google’s effort to digitize and make searchable all of the world’s books. The requirements were experience in the media or publishing industries and an MBA. The job was based in New York and would involve talking to libraries, publishing houses, authors, and readers trying to get everyone excited and in legal agreement. Book Search was one of those products that had run into trouble because of Google’s lack of focus. Google had a powerful vision: all the world’s books readable and searchable online, available to every man, woman, and child with an Internet connection, regardless of their location or educational or economic situation. It would be the library of Alexandria made virtual and accessible to all. But well-organized opponents of the plan said Google was trying to seize control of the publishing industry, to impoverish authors and publishers, to take the whole cloth of books and chop them into incomplete threads of information. Authors like John Updike accused Google of trying to destroy the pleasures of holding a book or wandering the aisles of a secondhand book shop hoping to make a serendipitous discovery. Google, they said, was going to fragment our attention spans and overturn centuries of the printed word. It was a debate I could get into.

Everyone who had applied for jobs at Google told me the interview process was a shambles. Decisions were hard to elicit. E-mails and telephone calls were ignored. You had to speak to ten or more people, who had to reach a consensus before sending your case up to Larry Page, one of the company’s founders. Even though Google now had more than five thousand employees, he still liked to vet every single hire. One of my section mates had received his job offer at two o’clock on a Saturday morning, in an e-mail sent from a Google executive’s BlackBerry. Knowing all this, I thought I’d just Zen out and see what happened.

Three weeks after I sent in my application, I received an e-mail inviting me to interview by telephone with a product manager at Google’s headquarters in Silicon Valley. The interview would last half an hour. The first few minutes were personal stuff—“why had I gone to business school” questions. In the second half, my interviewer set what he called “big, hairy, audacious goals” and asked me how I would reach them. For example, how would I develop an electronic reading device, market it, and get it into the hands of five million people in three months. Google, he said, liked big, hairy goals. I told him I’d try to do a tie-in with Oprah’s Book Club or perhaps an educational book publisher and popularize the device on college and high-school campuses.

Ten days later, I received another e-mail. Would I be available for another telephone interview? I prepared for more big, hairy goals. I saw them in my mind as enormous sea urchins, black and prickly, dripping with slime, floating out in space with one gloopy eye on the lookout for approaching business school students, primed to zap them with foul-smelling musk. This interview ran for forty-five minutes, but the interviewer sounded glum. It turned out he had owned his own technology company and sold it to Google. He hadn’t made as much money from the deal as he had hoped and was locked in for another couple of years. “I’d say I spend ninety percent of my day dealing with internal meetings and e-mails,” he told me. I imagined him in his cubicle at the end of another day in Mountain View, California, his ever-blinking in-box draining all that was left of his strength. A week later, in late February, I heard that the company wanted to fly me out to California for a full day of interviews.

It was a bright afternoon in San Jose when I arrived. The sun was a welcome change after the gloom of Boston. The hotel Google had booked for me was full, so I was sent to stay in a motel beside a shopping mall. The room was dark, overlooked a car park, and had that slightly sweet funk that made me think of businessman after businessman lying on the bed watching pornography. I dropped my bag and went out. I found a branch of Jamba Juice and sat outside, freezing my brain with a Passion Berry Breeze and flicking through the paperwork sent to me by Google. The documents read as if they had been written by a particularly grating high-school student. One sheet contained instructions for reclaiming expenses: “If you eat at a restaurant, be sweet and leave a tip of no more than 15%, just be sure to indicate it on each meal receipt . . . Be sure to submit your expenses within 15 days of incurring them . . . You snooze you lose! . . . We firmly believe paperwork is your friend . . . As such we may request additional clarification and detail on any business related expense in question—don’t be offended, just chalk it up to paperwork love.” Sitting there in the sticky warmth of the California evening, reading this and watching the cars drive in and out of the parking lot and the traffic lights swinging overhead, I felt a long, long way from home.

The next morning at nine, I stood outside the hotel waiting for a shuttle bus I had been promised would take me to Google. I had had a fitful night under a thin blanket, disturbed by the sound of my neighbor’s television burbling through the thin wall until two o’clock. A white stretch limousine pulled up in front of the hotel, and a young man in an embroidered gold waistcoat hopped out.

“Mr. Broughton?”